Sermon – St David’s Day 2026
John 3.1-17
I suppose that I ought to start by telling you what I am not going to talk about. I’m not going to talk about the Gorton and Denton by-election and I’m not going to talk about the safeguarding scandal involving the former Bishop of Swansea.
The only thing that I would say about both of those things is that they both illustrate the need for us, and the need especially in Lent, to reflect on our Christian faith and to try to apply it to difficult questions that we come across in our lives. For that purpose I want to look at our reading from chapter 3 of St John’s gospel. It’s the bit which contains the verse which is supposed to be the best known verse in the whole of the New Testament, verse 16, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’ I suppose that sums up Christianity in one sentence. You could spend weeks and weeks teasing out every little bit of meaning from it. But don’t worry – I’m only going to look at one or two of the things come out of this and perhaps bear on our lives today.
The context is the story of Nicodemus. I rather like Nicodemus. I think he’s one of my heroes, a bit like doubting Thomas. I like the way people like him meet Jesus and don’t quite get it right.
Actually when I went to Oberammergau in 2010 for the Passion Play I discovered that in the script which has been used for the Play, pretty well unchanged, since 1600, Nicodemus takes quite a big part and he is a bit of a hero.
Although he seems not to get it completely right in this passage in the Bible, in the story in the Passion Play he becomes an advocate for Jesus in the discussions in the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Council, which is what I think is meant by him being described as a ‘leader of the Jews’, and indeed Jesus referred to him as a ‘teacher of Israel’, although he says that although Nicodemus is a teacher, he still doesn’t get it.
In the Passion Play he’s obviously learned from his encounter with Jesus and he speaks up for him, but unfortunately to no avail. Here Nicodemus questions Jesus in a way that I think that any of us might have done. Jesus answers, rather mysteriously, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ I have to share with you that that’s not necessarily an agreed translation. If you read it in the New English Bible, for example, it says, “…unless a man has been born ‘over again’”, not born ‘from above’. The same word in Greek can have both meanings, so neither translation is necessarily wrong. It does look as though Nicodemus takes it as meaning born ‘over again’ – and he obviously started something, because you’ve certainly heard of the expression a ‘born-again Christian’. Nicodemus is clearly thinking about being born ‘again’ because he then asks how he can literally go back into his mother’s womb and start again.
So Jesus talks about being born from water and the spirit, which is usually interpreted to mean being baptised, somehow washing away the old sinful self and being filled with the spirit of God. We do see instances in the New Testament where Jesus or Saint Paul, talking about Jesus, where they talk about a distinction between body and spirit. Incidentally, the word for ‘spirit’ both in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament can also mean ‘wind’, and that’s perhaps why these days we tend to refer to the Holy Spirit rather than the Holy Ghost, because a ‘spirit’ is literally something breathed, like a wind or a breeze, and that definitely comes into what Jesus is talking about here. Here the version of the Bible which we are reading today doesn’t really hang together very well, because it has Jesus saying, “Don’t be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born again, from above’” and then goes on to talk about the wind – in the King James Bible, ‘the wind bloweth where it listeth’. You will recall in Romans chapter 8, St Paul makes a big distinction between body and spirit, and then in his first letter to the Corinthians chapter 15 St Paul argues that eternal life, life after death, consists in being born again spiritually.
It would have been a familiar way of thinking to people in the ancient world, because many Greek philosophers, notably Plato, believed in what is sometimes referred to as mind-body dualism. If we refer that back to the first thing that we were not going to talk about, the result of the by-election in Manchester, I think the challenge for us as Christians is, what do we think about the non-spiritual side, the social side, of people who are not as well off as ourselves, who are in need? What do we think about how best to arrange society?
Do we have a Christian outlook on that question or is it something where we say, ‘No, that’s politics; we are concerned with spiritual things.’ Are we saying, effectively, that that is simply a concern of the body as opposed to the spirit, and is Jesus making that distinction too?
It’s 40 years this year since the publication of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, as it was called, better known as Faith in the City.
There is an interesting discussion in there, a chapter under the heading ‘Theological Priorities’ and in that chapter it says, “The question at issue is whether the acknowledged Christian duty to ‘remember the poor’ should be confined to personal charity, service and evangelism directed towards individuals, or whether it can legitimately take the form of social and political action aimed at altering the circumstances which appear to cause poverty and distress.”
The report goes on to trace the history of both sides, spiritual, inward-looking religion addressing personal salvation, and social, political action: and it says that Christians should be involved in both.
It points out that this is in line with most of the history of the church. Fairly soon after the death of Jesus, obviously there was conflict with the Romans, when the Christians refused to worship the emperor as a god, and then down the ages there have been important pieces of social action, for example the Victorian campaign against slavery, inspired by Christian belief.
Perhaps the result of the by-election in Manchester was to some extent influenced by a desire to look for a more idealistic solution, reducing the gap between between rich and poor and welcoming the stranger. Some of the things that Mr. Polanski was saying have come from his Jewish background, where he referenced compassionate teachings from the Jewish law, which Jesus himself endorsed. So that’s the first thing that I am not talking about.
And then the second thing, which is much more difficult, is the scandal of the former Bishop of Swansea. Maybe the only thing we can say about it, say, if we were to try to imagine what Jesus would say about it, and perhaps if we read on in chapter 3 of St John’s Gospel, is that there is a very clear indication from Jesus at verse 19. He said, ‘Here lies the test: the light has come into the world, but men prefer darkness to light because their deeds were evil. Bad men all hate the light and avoid it, for fear their practices should be shown up. The honest man comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that God is in all he does.’ There must never be cover-ups, and the best way to avoid terrible abuses in future is for our safeguarding always to involve complete openness. We should always be open to have the light shone on everything we do.
You may say, having heard what I’ve just been talking about, that I have in fact failed to mention another very important thing today, and that is that it is Saint David’s day. I have to share with you that in the Church in Wales’ lectionary, Saint David’s day is, as they put it, ‘transferred’ to tomorrow because it would otherwise fall on a Sunday in Lent; it is a transferrable feast, if you’ve come across those, and here it’s because you are not allowed to celebrate a saint at the same time as you are having one of the Sundays in Lent – and anyway, Sundays are actually not counted as one of the 40 penitential days. Anyway that’s all far too technical for me, and I would just mention that it is Saint David’s day and we are allowed to feel good about being Welsh or being in Wales, as I am. I should tell you that my dearly beloved Mrs, Kenny, exclaimed to me, as we were crossing the Prince of Wales Bridge from Bristol for the first time together, ‘We are in a different country now!’ Well, it’s something to celebrate, I’m absolutely sure, and I’ve had a very happy five years here in Wales. Long may it continue.
Hugh D Bryant
hughdbryant 